As bishop of Lincoln, according to Sir Richard Southern, Robert Grosseteste ‘was – far more effectively than the king could ever be – the ruler of about one fifth of the whole population of England…’. It is the prerogative of great historians to pose challenges to their lesser successors, and what follows here is in effect a gloss on Southern's observation. It investigates the workings of church government within a limited area – the diocese of Carlisle, one far smaller than Lincoln – over the period of a single episcopate. And it is concerned less with diocesan government per se than with its secular implications, with what that government entailed for the laity upon whom it impinged.

Between 1258 and 1278 the diocese of Carlisle was ruled by Robert de Chaury. Almost certainly he took his name from Chawreth in Essex – he is first recorded in that county in 1239. By the end of 1244 he was employed in the wardrobe of Queen Eleanor of Provence, and in 1249 he became its comptroller. Of illegitimate birth, he needed a papal dispensation to take holy orders, and received one some time after 1243. By 1250 he had at least two benefices in Wiltshire and Somerset, and although he acquired at least two more elsewhere, in Cambridgeshire and Yorkshire, it was mainly in the two former counties that his ecclesiastical career prospered. Meanwhile his secular one advanced as well.